16750 - [RFE] Filters should allow "match whole word"

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[alex.seggie]

There is no easy way provided to specify that the text being matched
has to be preceeded and followed by a character that is not alphanumeric.
(ie a blank, comma, period, end of line, at-sign, etc)

This facility has to be provided since there currently no way to search for:
e.g.  ROSS without also matching ACROSS or ROSSWELL.

Since the purpose of this filter is to search for names, I feel that this
problem is a BUG and not a feature request.

Comment 1

[Sean Richardson]

This does seem to be an RFE, but I can confirm that it would be a useful
feature, even though names aren't the only thing worth filtering on.

What the reporter seems to be asking for would best be described as
"word matching" and could be described in the UI as "Match whole word only"
provided as an option to "Match substring."

It would clutter up the Filters UI some to provide this, but there is no
doubt that if the facility existed, it would get used.

Changing Severity to "Enhancement" and Component from "Networking-Mail" to
"Front End."

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

Improved bug summary, added to HELP WANTED list.

Another way to get "whole word" would be to add support for regular expressions.

Note also that adding this option to searching may be harder than filtering
because all filtering is done locally (so we have control of the comparison
functions) but searching may be at the mercy of the server's capabilities.

Comment 3

[Garth Wallace]

Bug #19442 is related. It's a request for regular expression matching.

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

moving way out there.

Comment 5

[alex.seggie]

Just to clarify.

This is not a request for regular expression matching. 
(Although if regular expression matching were provided, then this request 
would be automatically satisfied.)

To repeat the most important part of this request:
  What the reporter seems to be asking for would best be described as
  "word matching" and could be described in the UI as "Match whole word only"
  provided as an option to "Match substring."

This is NOT a large change.

Comment 6

[Håkan Waara]

-> Filters

Comment 7

[laurel]

This was listed as helpwanted and assigned to [e-mail] as we are not
implementing this and posted to the world at large for assistance. These kind of
assignees shouldn't be reassigned to the module owner, unless there was specific
reason for the change in status. I'll let Putterman comment, maybe there's been
some talk I don't know about...?

Comment 8

[scottputterman]

reassigning to naving

Comment 9

[Len Trigg]

Dont the "is"/"isn't" options fulfill this? This could probably be closed

Comment 10

[Mike Fedyk]

"Is" should match the entire string (hopefully case insensitivly), from begining
to end.

If you match on words then "abc cde" should also match "CdE aBc".

None of "is", "contains", "ends with", etc will do this, except for many chained
"contains", but that's a waste.  (At least it doesn't limit you to 5 like NS4.x
used to do)

Comment 11

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 12

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 13

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I'm surprised that this hasn't received any attention yet although it would make advanced searches and filters significantly more powerful and accurate. Seems as if we currently serve a lot of de-facto false positives to search/filter users because in a lot of scenarios they'll be looking for full words but none of the existing search/filter options support that.

This might require non-trivial changes.
Is there a "wholeword" option in backend?
How could the front end look like?

Perhaps this?

[Subject v] [contains v] [substring v] [search words]
                         |substring  |
                         |whole words|

Comment 15

[Kent James (:rkent)]

This would not be that hard to do, see for example nsMsgSearchTerm::MatchString where this would primarily be implemented. There is a lot of validity table junk to add though to support it.